OP-ED: SAVE Act will do more harm than good

The SAVE America Act just passed the House. Ostensibly, this is a commonsense bill to preserve the integrity of our elections. Democracies don’t always produce the best leaders, but well-structured democracies accurately reflect the electorate’s will, which makes them surprisingly effective forms of government. Unfortunately, this bill makes the system less likely to reflect the will of the electorate.

In-person, non-citizen voting fraud, which is what this bill is designed to prevent, is astonishingly rare. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, created a database of election fraud a few years ago; it counted 85 cases of noncitizens voting from 2002-23.

That’s not to say voting fraud has never been an issue. People’s perception of voter fraud may be colored by our history, when voting fraud was much more common (“vote early, vote often”). Voter registration and even secret ballots were not required in most states until late in the 19th century, leaving elections open to fraud.

Tammany Hall and other urban political machines were notorious for buying votes, having supporters vote multiple times, or simply stuffing ballot boxes. Lyndon B. Johnson likely won his Texas Senate seat in 1948 because his party added just enough votes to win (LBJ won by 87 votes; his opponent also added votes, just not as effectively as Johnson did). Republicans claimed that Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago machine added enough dead voters to John F. Kennedy’s tally to help him steal the 1960 election from Richard Nixon (though historians doubt there was enough fraud to change the outcome). Unlike Donald Trump in 2020, Nixon chose not to contest results because he didn’t want to be seen as a sore loser, which he felt would jeopardize his political future (Trump seems to be immune to things that would doom more conventional politicians). Of course, Nixon did not prevent others from contesting the election on his behalf…

Trump claims, without evidence, that three million to five million unauthorized immigrants robbed him of the popular vote in 2016 and that the 2020 election (or any election he loses) was stolen. He contested his loss in the 2020 election, but in the courts, where evidence matters, he failed completely; he lost (or withdrew from) 64 lawsuits. Unfortunately, if you repeat a lie enough times, people start to believe it (a June 2024 Monmouth Survey found 30% of respondents, and 68% of Republicans, believed Joe Biden won because of fraud).

Critics charge that Trump is using claims of election fraud not to overturn the 2020 election, but to seed enough doubt in future elections for him to claim that states Republicans have lost have fraudulent vote totals, and those states must be decided by Congress, which is filled with Republicans willing to do his bidding.

In-person voting fraud is essentially impossible to pull off on a scale large enough to impact a national election. To accomplish that, hundreds of thousands of people (in the right states) would need to be willing to go to jail to place a vote that most likely would not make a difference in the outcome, and they would have to maintain secrecy.

MAGA Republicans have been pushing the “Great Replacement” theory, which asserts that Democrats are opening our borders to win future elections (Democratic-voting illegal immigrants overwhelming the true native-born Republican majority). It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in national elections (they can vote in a few municipal elections), and there are stiff penalties for doing so (such as deportation or prison). There have been some cases of non-citizens voting, but again, the numbers are miniscule. The largest case involved 41 green card holders in North Carolina (legal immigrants, but not yet citizens) voting, out of 4.8 million votes in the election. They obviously had no impact on the outcome.

The other way to look at this is that if there are barriers to people voting, such as needing to get a birth certificate or a passport (at $130), some voters will be deterred (as Poll Taxes deterred Black voters in the Jim Crow South). When Kansas required a documentary proof of citizenship in 2013, noncitizen registrants accounted for 0.002% of the electorate, but it prevented 31,000 eligible citizens (12% of all new applicants) from registering to vote. Nationally, thousands of eligible voters would be disenfranchised for every fraudulent vote prevented. The cure would be far worse than the disease. Republican Scott Schwab, the current Kansas secretary of state, is against the idea. He was for it as a Kansas legislator before it was tried; he explained that implementation “didn’t go so well.”

Republicans seem to think that they will benefit from restricting the electorate, because voters without easy access to the required ID are often young or poor, and historically have voted more for Democrats. Traditionally, immigrants have also favored Democrats. While this political calculus should not be a consideration, it may not even be accurate. Trump made great inroads with Hispanics as well as less educated voters (who are much less likely to have a passport than educated voters). And women who took their husband’s last name when they married and thus cannot use their birth certificate to register to vote are much more likely to be traditional values voters, who usually vote Republican.

The SAVE Act is a political maneuver to allow the Republicans to retain political power, not an effort to make our democracy better. As usual, President Trump said the quiet part out loud at a Feb. 19 speech in Rome, Ga., speaking about the Republican efforts to “reform” the elections: “We’ll never lose a race for 50 years. We won’t lose a race. We want voter ID. We want proof of citizenship, and we don’t want mail-in ballots.” Making it more difficult to vote, even for admirable reasons, will prevent many legitimate voters from voting. This act will eliminate thousands of eligible voters for every ineligible one it stops, so it will do more harm than good; Republicans are trying to maintain power by impeding eligible voters who might vote against them.